The National Food-For-Work Programme, precursor to the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, is intended to provide work to the poorest of the poor, to enable them to earn enough to eat. An ambitious idea, but is it working on the ground? A recent survey by student volunteers unearths serious irregularities Kunal Gautam, a Delhi School of Economics student, and Tarun Sharma and Harminder Singh, both students at Kriori Mal College, spent three weeks of their summer vacation checkin...

Disabled activist Naseema Hurzuk’s story is representative of the trials and victories of millions of disabled people in India. In these excerpts from her book Naseema, The Incredible Story, she writes about Mohammed who has no hands but can hit a four in a cricket match, about wheelchair basketball matches in England, and more Naseema is the touching personal narrative of a wheelchair-bound paraplegic woman who led a normal and healthy life till the age of 16. From bewilderment at firs...

In tsunami-affected regions of Tamil Nadu, where CSOs are hard at work on rehabilitation, there is evidence that some of the lessons of Gujarat and Orissa have not been learnt -- communities are not being sufficiently involved in the rehabilitation effort, and inappropriate shelters stand empty of inhabitants For Fharzana Deesawalla, a volunteer who distributed relief and medicines with the Lifeline Rigid Hospital, Chennai, along the coast after the tsunami, an abiding image is ...

While the world focuses on the fishing communities that bore the brunt of the tsunami, spare a thought for the Irulas of Tamil Nadu. These tribals, once displaced from their forest homes and traditional occupations, have now lost their pathetic settlements and precarious livelihoods in coastal villages. In Nemeli, some Irulas have finally found a home They ranked at the very bottom of the heap. Driven out of their forest homes they had no land, no steady means of livelihood, no ...

Bhutan pumps 20% of its GDP into health and education. Ninety per cent of the population has some form of health coverage, and the UN’s World Food Programme is readying to exit the country. So, is a developed nation one that has a high GDP, or one like Bhutan, which refuses to accept that consuming more and producing more is the road to happiness? I am staying at a hotel that is quite cheap. My room overlooks the main town square and in the morning the sun is bright in the windows. M...

For weeks after the tsunami, children in the fishing villages around Chennai displayed signs of trauma, and viewed the sea that had engulfed their homes and disrupted their lives with fear. Four months after the disaster, they’re returning to school, and returning also, to the giving sea It was a Sunday, a day for the children of Ururkuppam and Oddaikuppam to forget about school attendance. But on the morning of December 26, 2004 they ran like never before to their Olcott Memorial High ...

More than a few people who have seen the recent Hindi film Swades speak of the sequences that they experienced as eloquent: for example, when protagonist Mohan Bhargava is returning from a visit to a village, where he apparently grasps, for the first time, the relentless realities of poverty and caste-based exploitation in India. At a small railway station, a young boy comes to the window selling water for 25 paise per clay cup. Mohan, who usually carries bottled water, now drinks this water,...

By Arshia Sattar Yasmine Kabir’s incredibly moving film looks at the plight of migrant workers who leave Bangladesh under economic pressure to find better-paying employment elsewhere. In 1995, more than 240,000 Bangladeshis left their homes in search of work. The film opens with black and white shots of the hundreds who throng the agencies that promise work in other countries. The men sit under signs that exhort them to remain honest and to make their country’s name “glorious” in the ...